Jackson had lately bought a couple of hunters, and Sundays, when it was good weather, Helen and he often went over to the club stables to see the horses and the hounds. It was a pleasant spot of a fine summer morning. The close-cropped turf rolled gently westward from the brow of the hill on which the club-house stood to a large horizon of fields, where a few isolated trees, branching loftily, rose against a clear sky. The stables were hidden in a little hollow some distance from the house, and beyond them was a paddock where a yelping pack of hounds was kennelled. Close at hand some captive foxes crouched in their pen, listening sharp-eyed and fearful to the noisy chorus of their enemies.
No sports of any kind were allowed on Sundays, for the community was severely orthodox in regard to the observance of Sunday, as in other merely moral matters. But when the weather was good there were usually to be found about the stables a number of young men and women, preparing for tête-à-tête rides over the country roads or practising jumps at the stone wall beside the paddock. Later in the morning they would stroll back to the club veranda for a cool drink, and gossip until the church-going members returned from service, and it was time to dress for luncheon.
Of the younger set Venetia Phillips was most often to be found down by the stone wall on a Sunday morning. She had come home from Europe this last time handsome, tall, and fearless, thirsty for excitement of all sorts, and had made much talk in the soberer circles of suburban society. She was a great lover of dogs and horses, and went about followed by a troop of lolloping dogs—an immense bull presented by an English admirer, and a wolf hound specially imported, being the leaders of the pack. She was one of the young women who still played golf now that it was no longer fashionable, and on hot days she might be seen on the links, her brown arms bare to the shoulders, and her blue black hair hanging down her back in a flood. She rode to all the hunts, not excepting the early morning meets late in the season. It was said, also, that she drank too much champagne at the hunt dinners, and occasionally allowed a degree of familiarity to her admirers that shocked public opinion in a respectable and censorious society which had found it hard to tolerate the mother.
Indeed, Mrs. Phillips could do nothing with her; she even confided her troubles to Helen. "My dear, the girl has had every chance over there abroad;—we had the very best introductions. She spoiled it all by her idiocy. Stanwood is making a fool of himself with a woman, too. Enjoy your children now, while you can spank them when they are naughty."
And Helen, although she had scant sympathy with the domestic tribulations of the rich, was puzzled by the girl. The friendship between them, which had begun so prosperously over Pete\'s sick-bed, had largely faded away. The winter after their visits to Dr. Coburn\'s laboratory Venetia had spent in a famous Eastern school, where Western girls of her class were sent to acquire that finish of manner which is still supposed to be the peculiar property of the older communities. On her return she was no longer the impulsive girl that stared wide-eyed at the eccentric doctor\'s opinions; there were reticencies in her which the married woman could not overcome. Since then their paths had crossed more rarely, and when they met there was a certain teasing bravado in Venetia\'s attitude which prevented intimacy.
Mrs. Buchanan\'s pungent gossip about the girl, and the widow\'s bitter complaint of her daughter, rose to Helen\'s mind one Sunday as they stood together at the stone wall by the club stables, watching Lane, who was trying a new hunter. Lane\'s temper was notoriously bad; the Kentucky horse was raw and nervous; he refused the jump, almost throwing his rider. Lane, too conscious of the spectators, his vanity touched, beat the horse savagely on the head.
"Low!" Venetia grumbled audibly, turning her back on the scene. "Come!" she said to Helen, seizing her arm. "Haven\'t you had enough of brutes for one morning? Come up to the club and have a talk. That\'s the man madam my mother would like to have me marry! Do you suppose he\'d use the whip on his wife?"
"He has his good side, even if his temper is short," Helen objected, as they strolled across the links toward the club-house. "You might do worse, Venetia."
"Quite the picture of a young girl\'s fancy! Forty-eight, and he\'s asked every eligible girl in the city to marry him, and they have all shied. So do I, though I wasn\'t in the running over there in London—in spite of all the fuss the Chicago papers made about me, I wasn\'t—you know Mrs. Phillips runs a regular press bureau! But I am not quite down to him yet."
They had the club veranda to themselves at that mid-morning hour. Venetia flung herself into a chair and flicked the tips of her boots with her whip. The small Francis, who had followed his mother, tumbled on the grass with the terrier Pete. Now and then Pete, who was privileged on Sundays, would hobble to the veranda and look at his mistress.
"You wouldn\'t marry a man like that, now would you? Well? You want to say something disagreeable, don\'t you! You have had it on your conscience for weeks. I could see it in your eye the other afternoon when you were with Mrs. Freddie Stewart—that nice little cat. Come, spit it out, as the boys say."
"Yes, I have had something on my mind."
"You don\'t like me now that I have grown up?"
"I thought we should be so much better friends," Helen admitted frankly.
"I am not the nice little girl you used to know when the doctor entertained us and Pete with scientific conversation mixed with social philosophy—that\'s what troubles you?"
"Why—why are you so different?"
"You mean, why do I smoke? drink champagne? and let men kiss me?"
She laughed at the look of consternation on Helen\'s face.
"That\'s what you mean, isn\'t it? My sporting around generally, and drinking too much wine at that dinner last fall, and supplying these veranda tabbies with so much food for thought? Why can\'t I be the nice, sweet young woman you were before you were married? A comfort to Mrs. Phillips and an ornament to Forest Manor!"
"You needn\'t be all that, and yet strike a pleasanter note," the older woman laughed back.
"My dear gray mouse, I\'m lots worse than that. Do you know where I was the other night when mamma was in such a temper because I hadn\'t come home, and telephoned all around to the neighbors?"
"At the Bascoms\'?"
"Of course, all sweetly tucked up in bed. Not a bit of it! A lot of us had dinner and went to see a show—that was all on the square. But afterward Teddy Stearns and I did the Clark Street levee, at one in the morning, and quite by ourselves. We saw heaps and heaps—it was very informing—I could tell you such stories! And it went all right until Teddy, like a little fool, got into trouble at one of the places. Some one said something to me not quite refined, and Ted was just enough elated to be on his dignity. If we hadn\'t had an awful piece of luck, there would have been a little paragraph in the papers the next morning. Wouldn\'t that have made a noise?"
"You little fool!" groaned Helen.
"Oh! I don\'t know," Venetia continued imperturbably. "Let me tell you about it. Just as I had hold of Ted and was trying to calm him down, somebody hit him, and there was a general scrap. Ted isn\'t so much of a fool when he is all sober. Just then a man grabbed me, and I found myself on the street. It was— Well, no matter just now who it was. Then the man went back for Ted, and after a time he got him, rather the worse for his experience. We had to send him to a hotel, and then my rescuer saw me home to the Bascoms\'. My, what a talking he put up to me on the way to the North Side!"
She waited to see what effect she had produced, but as Helen said nothing she continued with a laugh:—
"I suppose you are thinking I am a regular little red devil. But you don\'t know what girls do. I\'ve seen a lot of girls all over. And most of \'em, if they travel in a certain class, do just as fool things as that. On the quiet, you understand, and most of them don\'t get into trouble, either. They marry all right in the end, and become quiet little mammas like you, dear. Sometimes, when they are silly, or weak, or have bad luck, there\'s trouble. Now, I am not talking loose, as Ted would say. I\'ve known Baltimore girls, and New York girls, and Philadelphia girls, and Boston girls,—and the Boston ones are the worst ever!
"Why should the women be so different from the men, anyway? They are the same flesh and blood as their fathers and brothers, and other girls\' fathers and brothers, too.... Don\'t make that face at me! I\'m nice enough, too, at least a little nice. Didn\'t you ever sit here evenings, or over at the Eversley Club, and watch the nice little girls? But perhaps you couldn\'t tell what it me............